Google AdSense is a free, simple way for website publishers to earn money by displaying targeted Google ads on their websites. Today, we’ve added the ability to access AdSense data from the Google Analytics Core Reporting API. The AdSense and Analytics integration allows publishers to gain richer data and insights, leading to better optimized ad space and a higher return on investment.In the past, accessing AdSense data using the Analytics Core Reporting API has been a top feature request. We’ve now added 8 new AdSense metrics to the Analytics Core Reporting API, enabling publishers to streamline their analysis.

Answering Business QuestionsYou can now answer the following business questions using these API queries:

By accessing this data through the API, you can now automate reporting and spend more time doing analysis. You can also use the API to integrate data from multiple sites into a single dashboard, build corporate dashboards to share across the team, and use the API to integrate data into CRM tools that display AdSense Ads.

Once you complete the upgrade process, you can continue to access all of your historical data, plus get all the benefits of Universal Analytics including custom dimensions and metrics, a simplified version of the tracking code, and better cross-domain and cross-device tracking support.

Getting Started

You can upgrade your classic Google Analytics properties into Universal Analytics properties by following these two steps:

Step 1: Transfer your property from Classic to Universal Analytics.We’ve developed a new tool to transfer your properties to Universal Analytics that we will be slowly enabling in the admin section of all accounts. In the coming weeks, look for it in your property settings.

Step 2: Re-tag with a version of the Universal Analytics tracking code.After completing Step 1, you’ll be able to upgrade your tracking code, too. Use the analytics.js JavaScript library on your websites, and Android or iOS SDK v2.x or higher for your mobile apps.

Universal Analytics Auto-Transfer

Our goal is to enable Universal Analytics for all Google Analytics properties. Soon all Google Analytics updates and new features will be built on top of the Universal Analytics infrastructure. To make sure all properties upgrade, Classic Analytics properties that don’t initiate a transfer will be auto-transferred to Universal Analytics in the coming months.

We’re excited to offer you this opportunity to upgrade, and hope you take advantage of the resources we’ve created to guide you through the process. Visit the Universal Analytics Upgrade Google Group to share your comments and feedback. We’d love to hear what you have to say!

Many large companies have unique needs, with dozens of websites and many users. In the past, configuring Google Analytics for these companies was time-consuming and required too many clicks.

We're thrilled to announce a new set of APIs that will make it even easier for large companies to manage multiple websites. These APIs will streamline the Google Analytics setup process, allowing IT teams to programmatically manage and configure Google Analytics, so teams can focus their efforts on analysis and gaining insights.

Account Setup and Configuration APIs

To simplify account setup, we’ve added new APIs to manage Properties, Profiles, and Goals. This reduces the time it takes to build new account structures, and allows you to enable new features across all your existing accounts.

To reduce the overhead in managing user access, we’ve also added APIs to manage user permissions across all your accounts. With these APIs, you can quickly list which users have access to your accounts. You can also now write programs to sync Google Analytics users with corporate directory services such as LDAP.

The User Permissions APIs are public and can be used today.

Getting Started

To get started, you can find all the API resources on our Google Analytics APIs for Large Companies page. This launch brings new opportunities to developers, IT Teams, and Google Analytics users. Let us know what you think!

Certain Affinity, an experienced independent game developer has recently been working on their first mobile title, Age of Booty: Tactics. Age of Booty: Tactics is an asynchronous turn-based tactics game hybridized with a collectable card game. Certain Affinity wanted a solution enabling them to measure and analyze specific metrics to improve both the pre-release and post-release designs of the game. They researched a number of analytics solutions, but were frequently frustrated by the cost, size, and limited flexibility offered.

Ramping Up Reporting

Certain Affinity has used Google Analytics for website analytics since 2005, and began talking to mobile partners after becoming aware of Google Analytics’ (GA’s) application in mobile gaming. Given their existing experience, the relative cost of the platform, and the extensive feature set, Certain Affinity quickly and easily integrated GA into the game. The early inclusion of GA into the design process resulted in easy access to analytics to assist in influencing direction across design, art, and ultimately production.

UI Optimization

Google Analytics provides an intuitive way to understand engagement across multiple screens and events. By leveraging engagement flow and average screen time analytics, Certain Affinity understood when specific areas within the UI were either too complex or buried to drive the desired behavior. They identified that the storefront was overly complex and required significant streamlining to become easily accessible. Additionally,they found that a number of options within the menus were too complex and lead to users looping within the UI prior to engaging in an actual game. They also were able to reduce screens per session from 15.5 to 8, resulting in a cleaner UI as well as less back and forth in the game.

Gameplay Duration

Certain Affinity wanted to better understand the average duration of play to optimize the experience on mobile. Given that users tend to spend less time gaming on their mobile devices than in the console space, it was vital to ensure the game was consumable and enjoyable in the “bite sized” engagement window.

Certain Affinity leveraged session durations to understand the existing top-level behavior. In analyzing the data,they found that the typical session was over 25% longer in length than was ideal. They tracked events such as turn submission, undo, and return to main menu to identify any behavior that was artificially extending the average duration of play. Certain Affinity then specifically targeted optimization to the areas requiring the most work.

Custom Dimensions

By leveraging Google Analytics Custom Dimensions, Certain Affinity could measure analytics across a number of key metrics in the mobile gaming space including retention, virality, and monetization. While this data was not widely used until launch,the ability to verify collection was instrumental in ensuring a successful soft launch.“The flexibility GA provides is quite amazing. While no analytics provider will ever have everything you need out of the box, it is great to have a solution that allows us to implement our own requirements [through custom variables], so easily!” explains Certain Affinity’s Lead Server Engineer.

Ever wanted to learn more about Google Analytics APIs? Maybe even have someone talking to you about how to use them? Well, if you haven’t gotten a chance to tune in, we’re excited to present Google Analytics on Google Developers Live. Our Developer Relations team has been hard at work putting these together; we’ve done a few already, and also have some coming up that we’re excited about!We'll be doing these a few times a month, on Thursdays at 10AM PDT (full schedule here). Each show is about a half hour.The show will either take you “Behind the Code” or “Off the Charts.” Off the Charts is a series about getting into the deep features of Google Analytics, understanding how it works, things you can do with it and how to use the feature itself. “Behind the Code” will not only showcase new GA features and technology, but also take us behind the scenes and give you a chance to hear directly from some of the engineers, product managers, and others who work behind the scenes to design, build, and deliver these new features.Here’s some of our favorites from the past:

Off the Charts: Google Analytics superProxy

Google Analytics superProxy is an open source project developed by the Google Analytics Developer Relations team. Join Developer Advocate Pete Frisella to learn how to use this application to publicly share your Google Analytics reporting data and power your own custom dashboards and widgets.

Behind the Code: Analytics Mobile SDK

The new Google Analytics Mobile SDK empowers Android and iOS developers to effectively collect user engagement data from their applications to measure active user counts, user geography, new feature adoption and many other useful metrics. Join Analytics Developer Program Engineer Andrew Wales and Analytics Software Engineer Jim Cotugno for an unprecedented look behind the code at the goals, design, and architecture of the new SDK to learn more about what it takes to build world-class technology.Don’t forget to check out next week’s show (8/29, 10AM PDT) on the recently launched Metadata API, which contains all the dimensions and metrics that you can query with in Google Analytics Reporting APIs. We’ll be discussing how you can use this API to to simplify data discovery. Tune in here!Posted by Aditi Rajaram, Google Analytics Developer Relations team

Google Analytics users can use the Core Reporting API to save time by building dashboards and automating complex reporting tasks. This API exposes over 250 data points (dimensions and metrics), and new data is added every few months. For many developers, it can be difficult to keep their applications up to date with all the latest data.

To make things easier, today we are launching the new Google Analytics Metadata API to simplify data discovery. The Metadata API contains all the queryable dimensions and metrics included in the Core Reporting API. We’ve also added attributes for each dimension and metric, such as the web or app name, full text description, grouping, metric calculations, deprecation status, and whether the data is queryable in segments. You can check out at a live Metadata API response here.

You now have programmatic access to generate the same list of dimensions and metrics we use to generate our public documentation.

You can now create this list using the Metadata API.

Saving Developers Time

When you create tools to query the Core Reporting API, you can use the Metadata API to automatically update your user interfaces. For example, Analytics Canvas, a popular 3rd party Google Analytics data extraction tool, uses the Metadata API to keep its query building interface up to date.

Analytics Canvas uses the Metadata API to power its query builder.

According to James Standen, founder of Analytics Canvas, "In the past, keeping Analytics Canvas up to date with the Google Analytics API dimensions and metrics required a lot of manual updating to our application. The new Metadata API automates this process, saving us time, and giving our users direct access to all the great new data the instant it's available. Users love it!"

New Deprecation Policy

To increase data transparency, we’ve also published a new data deprecation policy for dimensions and metrics. New data we release will be announced on our changelogs and automatically added to the Metadata API. Data we decide to remove will be marked as deprecated in the Metadata API, allowing developers to gracefully remove these values from their tools.

Get Started Today

Our goal was to make this API super easy to use. To get started, take a look at our list of resources below:

Mobile Apps pose a unique set of challenges for marketers and developers. On the web, you can iterate on content and features in near-real-time and deploy conversion tracking, Remarketing, analytics and other tags to measure the effects on your users. Apps, on the other hand, are effectively frozen at the point of user install. Making even the slightest change means waiting until your next update makes its way through the various app stores and even then, you can’t be sure that all of your users will update quickly, if at all.

The surprisingly static nature of Mobile Apps creates significant problems. Forget to add an event to a key button press? Tough! Need to add conversion tracking for a last minute campaign? Too bad! Realize you need to change an important configuration setting? Sorry, not possible... that is, until now! Previewed at Google I/O earlier this year, today we're launching Google Tag Manager for Mobile Apps.

With Google Tag Manager for Mobile Apps, you instrument your app once and from then on, you can change configurations and add analytics, remarketing and conversion tracking later – without updating your app.

Just like on the web, Google Tag Manager continues to be a free product, streamlining the process of adding “tags” to your native iOS and Android apps, making it both easy and accountable. Measuring key events is now as simple as 1-2-3:

Include the new Google Analytics Services SDK (Android, iOS) in your app. This new unified SDK includes both Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics functionality while sharing a common framework.

Push interesting and important events to the Data Layer. Once events are registered on the data layer, they can be used to trigger Google Tag Manager Tags and Macros.

Use Google Tag Manager’s web-based interface to write Rules and determine when various Tags should fire.

If you’re already a Google Tag Manager user, then there’s really nothing new for you to learn. The same style Tag Templates, Rules and Macros that you already know are now available for the new Mobile App Container Type. New users can get up to speed quickly, thanks to the easy-to-use web-based interface.

Google Tag Manager for Mobile Apps natively supports AdWords Conversion Tracking, AdWords Remarketing and Google Analytics for Mobile Apps (Universal Analytics) tags. It also supports custom and 3rd party tracking events using the custom tag. For Mobile Apps, Google Tag Manager also takes things one step further using the Value Collection Macro. As we previewed at I/O 2013, developers can now create server-side configurations and use them to build highly configurable Apps. Collectively, these new features make Google Tag Manager a powerful tool for marketers and App Developers alike.

You may have seen our news about the launch of the Content Experiments API a few months ago, and we’re excited to share one of the ways it’s been used since the launch. SiteApps created an experiment to A/B test your website’s call to action using our Content Experiments API -- take a look at their post below to see how they did it!

Live A/B testing is arguably the most scientific strategy you can use for conversion rate optimization. Nothing better than identifying what really sells more than your actual users in the real environment. And probably the call-to-action (CTA) button – “Sign-Up“, “Buy Now” or “Learn More” – is one of the most important elements to test. Some websites earned millions with a simple button change:

There’s an app for that

We created the Button Optimizer app on SiteApps to allow any website to instantly test & optimize their call-to-action without any technical knowledge (and for free!). With three simple steps, you can increase your website’s conversion right now:

Install SiteApps on your website (it’s free)

Create a Content Experiment in Google Analytics

Add the Button Optimizer app

Then you can see this sexy report in Google Analytics and see how a small change can really impact your bottom line:

Eating our own dog food

Take a look at this video on testing the siteapps.com homepage button in under 3 minutes:

Over the past year we’ve added many new features to Google Analytics. Today we are releasing all of this data in the Core Reporting API!

Custom Dimensions and Metrics

We're most excited about the ability to query for custom dimensions and metrics using the API.

Developers can use custom dimensions to send unique IDs into Google Analytics, and then use the core reporting API to retrieve these IDs along with other Google Analytics data.

For example, your content management system can pass a content ID as a custom dimension using the Google Analytics tracking code. Developers can then use the API to get a list of the most popular content by ID and display the list of most popular content on their website.

Mobile Dimensions and Metrics

We've added more mobile dimensions and metrics, including those found in the Mobile App Analytics reports:

It was a busy week in San Francisco at Google I/O. We unveiled new products and features, such as deeper mobile app analytics integration with Google Play and Google Tag Manager for mobile apps. If you missed the earlier announcement, you can learn about our new features here.

Our team at Google I/O!

We also gave several great presentations on some of our new features. Our Developer Relations team also showed off some tools for multi-screen measurement here, so take a look if you didn’t manage to catch our livestream this past Thursday.